Main menu

It’s 1985. I’m a cook, a bike messenger, a performer, a young man out and about in downtown New York City. Every morning at 5:30 I swim for near an hour in a pool on the far west side of Manhattan and 49th Street, up before sunrise, riding over the Brooklyn bridge in the dark to get to the pool,… Read more →

First Susan Sontag: way back 30 years ago, a few seconds ago, my girlfriend was a…do I say? am I breaching thin confidentiality? or like everything else, are enough people dead, that it doesn’t matter? It won’t for this, but will for other parts. As my young son says when I tell him a story, though none yet like… Read more →

This is the unfinished sketch of the curriculum for my 12 year old who homeschooled last year, and this year is half homeschooling and half auditing community college and high school classes where he has the interest and ability to hold his own with older kids (socially — it’s an ok fit, they all work well together, he has ‘younger sibling status’ it seems).… Read more →

Homeschooling #2: some vague specifics This is not just regarding homeschooling; this was a list we started awhile back, with specific life skills and academic skills we wanted for our son; with input from him; and where he’s at right now (at 12) Although categorized, it’s interdisciplinary. Cooking = math = science = writing. Social skills = civics = history… Read more →

‘The Future of Food’ Nope. The future was already here 60 years ago; the current technology focus is a solution in search of a problem. We f*cked it up 60 years by permitting our economy to reward farming using factory made fertilizers and pesticides; by shutting down local farms and outsourcing 95% of our farm needs to Florida, California,… Read more →

A Slightly Radical Experiment A few things we learned about homeschooling this last year: homeschooling our willful, impetuous, determined boy, widely read, fierce 12 year old fox of a boy. He’s got good manners, a strong handshake, and intense curiosity about science, about literature and history, about construction and design, but him, this shining boy was being extinguished by his… Read more →

Manufacturing in China leaves a lot to be desired. I could show you with statistics and charts why this is so, and how the Chinese government figures are full of lies (as are all government’s figures). However, that’s tedious – the precis is this: it’s a fucking disaster, costs are way understated, unrealistic downstream cost (ie zero). Here’s what you… Read more →

I am an economist by training and by trade a consultant to corporations and individuals looking to understand how to extract value, and what value actually is. By the standards of businesspeople, entrepreneurs, press – i’m moderately successful, could be dramatically successful; by my own standards I’m reasonably ‘successful’, but what is success? This is among the first questions I… Read more →

Reading David Foster Wallace even for a brief moment I think about this, this not in his writing: that the apotheosis of co-dependency – right after one realizes that one hates the persons or elements that one is expediting for…is that that hatred, that feeling just dissipates and what one is left with is nothing; also the nothing of having… Read more →

John Fahey wrote ‘How Bluegrass Music Ruined My Life’ I believe it was called. He was a brilliant composer, musician, writer, impresario, who was homeless and crazy for awhile and lived and died within my lifetime. A girl I knew in 1977 traveling through Canada called me up a few months ago. We hadn’t been in touch since the night… Read more →